The handbook project

The handbook is an ongoing design project, for a commons-stewarded digital infrastructure.

Summer 2021: meet.coop embarked on the participatory design and prototyping of a multistakeholder governance regime . This handbook sets out the evolving design, together with auxiliary materials to support the design practice.

Summer 2022: we started to rebuild the draft handbook here within the Discourse forum. It is intended to evolve into a handbook of protocols for meet.coop in all its operational aspects, internal political economy and contributions in the wider community. Overall we anticipate that the handbook might become some kind of open-source means for organising in the coop-commons economy, and specifically in the provisioning, stewarding and enjoying of transformative digital infrastructure in the commons. Maybe some kind of ‘college’ might be evolved, which meet.coop serves as an infrastructure provider and co-facilitator.

Part of the content of this draft handbook will be extracted, as a constitution , to be ratified at an initial General Assembly of meet.coop. Part will also be abstracted as a Code of conduct .

The design practice operates via four foci:

  • commons.hour - a venue for multistakeholder contribution to the design of the meet.coop commons
  • the constitution of meet.coop - leading to formal incorporation as a coop; also a code of conduct.
  • an ecology of working practice - including venues, media, tools and protocols - for the operational and strategic steering of the coop, including a Board and a General Assembly ; and
  • this coop handbook - addressing political economy (provisioning a stack of digitally mediated spaces), social relations (radical practice in civil society organising and the coop-commons economy) and stewarding (assemblies and deliberations).
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